Gabe Oppenheim
Style is always in the eye of the beholder. You do the research to be a well-informed beholder, but still, the final judgment is personal and subjective. You go on how you feel, and you should: lo que importa es la sensación. It might make humans more animal than we care to admit, but in the end, our greatest truths lie in emotional responses. And whatever rationales we attach to them are secondary and after the fact. As the neuroscientist and English professor Iain McGilchrist explains, the brain responds with emotions in the right hemisphere before the left hemisphere even assembles its worded reason.
And so: boxing. It’s technical, sure, but above all, emotional. You can’t really watch it and not respond—and that response is unavoidably composed of highly charged feelings, even if boxing also inspires an intellectual response. Analysis, even simple description, comes much later.
If I had watched but a couple fights in my life, my response to boxing would likely be to the oddity of blood sport in the twenty-first century. That’s the feeling that colors nearly all novice responses today. But I’ve seen more than a couple bouts and, likely, so have you. What remains once the novelty has worn off is what the fighters themselves bring to the ring. Each arrives with training under his belt, previous fights, and sparring sessions. Each is a product of these experiences and also whatever touch and spin he has—perhaps, unwittingly—put on them. They’ve placed personality on those punches—and in their defensive slips, too.
Call it style.
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I once watched in person the most stylish fighter in the world. It was eight years ago, at a card copromoted by Peltz Boxing and Top Rank in South Philly. The main event was supposed to be the lightweight Almazbek “Kid Diamond” Raimukulov against a Mexican challenger, Antonio Pitalua, who had an impressive 43–3 record but one that had been compiled entirely in Mexico against unknowns. It could’ve been a blowout, or maybe that record, despite being a cipher to us, was a reflection of the man’s ability, in which case it would’ve been an evenly matched and possibly brutal fight. But Pitalua wasn’t able to secure a visa despite frantic appeals, so at the last moment, as had happened so many times before, the world’s most stylish fighter was called in as a replacement.
Enter Emanuel Augustus. By this time in his career, Augustus—who originally fought under the name Emanuel Burton, out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana—was a bedraggled thirty-two years old. He had made a habit of taking any fight offered him, no matter how late the notice, or how biased the venue, and he had been screwed out of plenty of decisions as a result. His ugly record was thirty-four wins, twenty-seven losses, and six draws.
Here’s what the record masked. All the fights the judges in Texas stole from him early in his career. The draw with hometown hero Soren Sondergaard (38–1) in Denmark that should’ve been a win. The loss to Pete Taliaferro (31–5) in Mobile, Alabama, that the crowd booed, because Augustus had surely won. He schooled an unbeaten Allen Vester in Denmark, but knowing he was down on the cards, he took a dive just to demonstrate the sliminess of the proceedings. When Augustus lost a tight decision in Mississippi to Teddy Reid—two judges had him down a single round, the third down two—the crowd booed just as they had in Alabama.
In 2001, he fought Micky Ward, the man whose life story was later made into the film The Fighter, in what The Ring called the fight of the year. Teddy Atlas, the ESPN commentator and former trainer, scored the bout a draw on television. But the judges saw it the way they always did with Augustus. Ward was the name fighter. Augustus was the boxcar nomad. One scored it 98–90 against Augustus, as part of another unanimous decision not in his favor. There were undeserved draws, as when Augustus schooled a 16–0 fighter named Aguilar in Las Vegas and was handed even cards—essentially a concession that his efforts were so superior that there was no plausible way to give him a loss. In Hidalgo, Texas, Augustus was disqualified for not looking at the referee. The ESPN article on the match was headlined, “Augustus Can’t Win.”
“They say you don’t have no manager, no promoter, you don’t deserve this fight,” Augustus said afterward. “I don’t know how to act.” The man was no fortunate son. And none of the other injustices compared to the devastation of his first fight against Courtney Burton, in Muskegon, Michigan. In the ring, Augustus was penalized a point for spinning, which was part of his sui generis style but not a violation of any rules. The ref called two hard body shots that Augustus threw low blows and gave Burton time to recuperate from them. And then came the decision: One judge, bless him, gave Augustus the deserved victory. The other two barely gave him a round. On ESPN, Teddy Atlas, after scoring the fight for Augustus, confronted the Michigan Boxing Commission officials. Fight writers urged fans to send letters to Michigan in protest. Eventually, the referee and two judges were investigated.
The decision stood, as it almost always does. It’s boxing. Everyone may agree you were jobbed, but no one will offer redress. Two years after I saw him, in the waning moments of his career, he was screwed out of yet another decision, against prospect Francisco Figueroa. In his final match, four years after I saw him, he faced an undefeated prospect in Detroit, pressed the kid past his limit—and then had two points deducted by the referee for nonoffenses. They couldn’t even let the man leave the sport in the peace.
Despite all that, Augustus had a hell of a career. He was at one point the number-two-ranked fighter at 140 pounds. He beat 23–1 Alex Trujillo, knocked out 47–10–2 Ray Oliveira, knocked out 37–1–2 Carlos Wilfredo Vilches, knocked out 25–1–1 David Toledo. He drew with Leavander Johnson, who’d go on to become a respected world champ.
And he had pioneered a fighting style all his own—one soon dubbed Drunken Master, after the 1978 Hong Kong martial arts picture and the subsequent variations on it that became a staple of the kung fu genre. Of course, Augustus was stone-cold sober when he let his limbs dangle and his legs bend as though he couldn’t stand straight. These were moves that only appeared loopy, and even then, only for a few moments. It soon became clear to any observer that the jester possessed a kind of genius: Stylishness.
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Style and stylish suggest slightly different things in the boxing world. Begin with style.
Boxing may look like brutal chaos to the uninitiated, but it’s bound by strict rules. You have to stay within the ropes. I think it’s helpful to think of the ring as the Spanish do—cuadrilátero—a four-sider, a quadrilateral—because boxing is bound in a mechanistic way, a compact way. It feels to me as if each of the four walls bears down a little harder on the participants with each passing round. And so that’s your four-sider—your canvas, literally and figuratively.
Within that frame, you can be as inventive as you want, so long as you stay vertical and don’t foul. And so there’s combustion, but instead of pushing air and fuel into a cylinder, you’re pressing two highly trained men into a constricted quadrilateral and asking them to put on a beat-down show. It may be a cruel rite, but no matter, the arrangement is what matters here. Everything before and after the fight is orchestrated. But during the fight, no matter how well-thought-out your game plan, you must improvise. The only boxing without improvisation is hitting the heavy bag—because even a shadowboxer sets a part of his brain aside to surprise himself.
That improvisation is style. And just as poets, in Harold Bloom’s estimation, feel the anxiety of influence and so deviate from a previous generation’s style (at least the originals do), so do boxers try to create a new look for themselves. The parallel isn’t as fantastic as it may seem at first. The best boxers take seriously the training they get from their elders and incorporate the relevant boxing canon into their work. But, at the least, this means they have to engage with styles of the past. Start dipping real low as a light southpaw, and you’ll inevitably draw comparisons to Pernell Whitaker. And bully for you if you do—he was one of the most elusive fighters of all time. But you have to figure out whether you want to press further in that direction, become a closer mold of the original, or whether a little of his defense is enough, and now you want to see whether a Sergio Martinez up-jab might be a nice companion piece to a low stance. And so on.
Take away the combat component of boxing—the fact that the end result of movement is to score and win by inflicting pain—and focus on the movements alone, and you arrive at style. George Bellows captures two combatants in his painting Stag at Sharkey’s who together resemble a Francis Bacon–painted piece of meat. It looks like pure brutality. But look more closely, and you see energy flowing through one guy into the other and back. The fighter on the right leans over his opponent with an arched spine, pulling back his right fist, letting the weight of his musclebound shoulders fall onto the rival, as though he wants his challenger to absorb not only a punch but the quintessentially human burden of standing up beneath a load—of carrying baggage. The rival on the left’s response is what lends the scene its looping style: he springs forward off his toes, pressing into the brute before him, nearly lifting him up with the linear force of his calf muscles. Bellows has frozen a single moment in a fight so that we’ll never know who prevails. What we’re left with instead is the constant cycle of thrust-parry, push-pull—of boxing style.
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When boxing bears a very personal imprint, when it becomes perhaps unnecessarily personal, that’s when style becomes stylishness. It is idiosyncrasy harnessed for a purpose—inimitability within the flow of the game.
When Joe Louis pulls his right elbow up high to drop his gravity-propelled right in the slot, that’s style, not stylishness. Louis was a completely practical fighter in an era when a black champ who was more outré might lose his white audience. Who knows what other moves Louis could’ve employed had he lived in the swag era—or maybe he would’ve stuck to the book anyway, which has its own virtues.
Stylishness is different. I first began to notice it myself in the fight tapes of Sugar Ray Leonard, in his windups—you’re never supposed to bring your elbow that far back before punching, and yet he did—and his occasional bolo punches. No, he wasn’t the punch’s progenitor, but I didn’t yet know who Kid Gavilán or Ceferino Garcia was. There was something about the way Leonard moved that was apart from the standard procedures taught in gyms, something nonpareil. That quality of apartness explains why, in the late nineteenth century, so many fighters adopted the nickname “Nonpareil”—because the truly original fistic artist causes viewers to marvel and muse, That dude is the only one who could get away with that.
Being a millennial, I was introduced to the next level of stylishness by Roy Jones Jr. He is very likely one of the best athletes ever to fight—and one of the sportsmen signed to the Jordan brand on whose shoes the Jumpman logo never seemed incongruous. In his prime, RJJ seemed like Jordan in a ring, bending his knees, sticking out his chin, lowering his arms and then snapping up quicksilver hooks and haymakers. He was athlete enough to fly despite that unconventional and dangerous positioning. The man knocked guys down from inconceivable angles.
The ultimate example was Jones’s takedown of James Toney in their fight for Toney’s super middleweight title in 1994. Going into the bout, The Ring had Toney ranked second in the world pound for pound, and Jones third. Toney was the betting favorite, too. But Jones destroyed him from the opening bell, in part because of his unparalleled stylishness. Toney came out utilizing his usual shoulder-roll defense, which protects the chin, but Jones rendered it useless by lashing Toney’s flanks with whip-like body blows. When Toney dropped his hands over his torso, Jones swooped in with hooks to the head, in the vein of Floyd Patterson, only with an unparalleled plyometric burst. When Jones missed a straight right, his burst was such that he could land a left hook before Toney could even capitalize on Jones’s imbalance. Jones had the answers before Toney could even ask the questions. By only the third round, Toney had an air of desperation about him. He needed to turn the tables somehow, because if he didn’t, he’d lose undoubtedly. So Toney lowered his arms to his sides, stuck out his chin, and generally clowned about as though assuming Jones’s style. Who knows precisely what Toney was thinking, but it seemed to be something near this: Maybe Jones’s stylishness is a trick. Maybe it’s so psychologically depleting to see yourself beaten by a technically unsound fighter that Roy Jones wins via the head game. And so, if I can land from this posture, Jones’s entire aura of invincibility will dissolve.
Of course, if stylishness were so easily copied, it would cease to be stylishness. It wouldn’t bear emulating. No, Jones’s moves were an organic extension of Roy Jones the athlete, Roy Jones the man. No one else could hear his internal radio, and no one else had the fast-twitch muscles to realize those sounds in movement. With his arms low to the floor and his head jutted out, same as Toney, as if in a Wild West stare down, Jones launched a left hook toward Toney’s chin in a split second. Down went Toney. And the fight, for all intents and purposes, was over in the third round.
And yet, as much as I love Roy Jones and could watch him in his prime on loop endlessly, particularly those moments when he moved his hands behind his back and then whacked his opponent on the chin with both fists simultaneously, he falls just short of being the most stylish ever.
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Don’t take my opinion for it. Go to YouTube or Dailymotion or whichever website currently has the video that has been constantly posted, taken down, and reposted for a decade. It’s a montage of Emanuel Augustus’s Drunken Master highlights—high-stepping, swinging his arms like a pendulum, raising his chest toward the ceiling like a member of a southern drumline—set to the hip-hop song “I Think They Like Me,” by Dem Franchize Boyz.
It doesn’t matter whether you like hip-hop. Just pay attention to the beat—and watch as every single move Augustus makes is in sync with the song’s rhythm, as though it were playing on a loop in his head. You see this in gyms sometimes, because a boom box will play while guys are shadowboxing or hitting the bags. But no one else I’ve ever seen has achieved anything near this singularity. Not even Roy Jones. It’s more than uncanny. It’s as if Augustus had the song in his head his entire career.
Like all good artists, he drew inspiration where he found it. Many moves were cribbed from his favorite combat video game—the Japanese Tekken—and from the Brazilian martial art–dance capoeira. That Augustus had the musical and athletic talent to then time these moves to a discernible beat, to a legitimate pattern, is all the more incredible. Lots of boxers shimmy and groove, but no other spins, swings, kicks, and flows to a metrical pattern while enacting video game blows that actually land. Augustus KO’d Burton when he finally got a rematch with him, and Floyd Mayweather Jr. called Augustus his most difficult opponent for years after their nine-round contest in October 2000. That was a little more than six years before I saw Augustus in person in Philadelphia when he was a worn-out thirty-two.
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The Cubans may be the most stylish national cohort of boxers, for Cuba has long been a man-made incubator of unique flair in the arts. Much like the Japanese during the shogunate’s ban on foreign entry, Cubans have evolved culturally apart from the rest of the world, because of Castro’s policies and the US embargo.
Obviously, impoverished Cubans didn’t choose to have it thus, but ex post facto, they’ve done the best they can on their prison-island. Like their inventiveness in restoring cars without most tools and parts, their boxing—defensive minded, technically infallible, almost severe in its fast-reflex execution—is both economical and elegant. You see it whenever a Cuban boxer defects and turns professional or, in smaller dollops, during world amateur tournaments and the Olympics. That the Cubans often resemble each other in the ring—the same way stereotypical Mexican fighters do, wading in to throw body shots—underlines their collective stylishness but keeps them as individuals out of the running for most stylish.
Still, watching them is a first step toward understanding how mastery of boxing fundamentals, carried to extremes by brilliant talent (the Cuban system lets only the island’s best into the national training center, known as The Farm), can become its own style. The moves may be basic—occasionally, even robotic—but their sum total is a marvel.
Enter “Gypsy” Joe Harris, the only other fighter besides Augustus I considered for most stylish. Gypsy Joe’s moves and world, somewhat like the Cubans’, were determined by circumstances beyond his control. As a teen, Harris robbed children of their candy on Halloween night. One of those kids threw a brick in retaliation that permanently blinded him in his right eye. Far from distancing Gypsy from boxing, his incapacity made him a star in the sport.
Gypsy Joe crafted a most unusual style that allowed him to account for his opponent’s positioning at all times—or, at the very least, rob the rival of sight, too. This could mean turning his back on an opponent, who would be forced to rush him, allowing Gypsy Joe to catch him coming in. It could mean positioning himself perpendicularly to the ropes, one hand holding on to them for balance, so that only his left eye faced outward. It could mean fighting backward, his spine facing the opponent’s face, his arms swinging like oars. He didn’t slug so much as fling, his fists buzzing about like demonically possessed flies.
Because he had the athleticism, despite his boozing and womanizing, to win big with this style, Gypsy Joe became a sensation. At first, it was just in Philly, the home at that time of champs or contenders in every division (welterweight Gypsy Joe’s best friend was the other Joe—heavyweight Joe Frazier), but he broke out nationally when a Sports Illustrated writer in his prime, Mark Kram, spent days with Gypsy Joe on the streets of North Philly, known as the Badlands. Kram was a stylist in his own right. His June 19, 1967, article on Gypsy Joe became that week’s cover story, making Gypsy Joe the only boxer to have appeared on the cover without being either a heavyweight or a champion.
Sadly, though Gypsy Joe beat welterweight champ Curtis Cokes (in a nontitle fight that conferred no honors on the winner), almost no footage exists of him enacting his whirling dervish tactics. Russell Peltz, the Philly promoter, has an audiotape (from the early 1970s, seemingly) of Gypsy Joe begging manager Jim Williams to find him matches anywhere, after the commission banned the boxer for his blindness in 1968, reputedly because Gypsy Joe had threatened to leave his management team of Yank Durham and Eddie Reddish, who had for years coaxed the commission into letting him fight.
For years, collectors of old footage would mention online that there did exist a fragment of Gypsy Joe on film, though no one knew where. I searched for it for years while writing a book on the history and culture of Philly fighters. Then, one day a few years ago, a clip popped up on YouTube: Gypsy Joe against former welterweight and middleweight champ Emile Griffith in the Spectrum in South Philly. It’s just three minutes long, and it has no sound—it looks like a tape taken from a TV station’s archives. And this was the lone loss on Gypsy Joe’s record before he was banned. There are various explanations offered for why he seemed so disengaged during the bout: Gypsy Joe was upset his managers were spending so much time with their prize heavyweight Joe Frazier and had already begun parting from the team; he hadn’t trained right because he was too enamored of the nightlife, particularly his many women and his favorite drink—whiskey and milk; he had needed to spend time in the sauna and take diuretics to cut enough weight to make the 160-pound limit. None of these reasons, though, stopped Griffith from crowing afterward, “They wrote that all Gypsy had to do was show up and boogaloo and he’d win.”
But even in this fragment, you can see glimmers of the Gypsy Joe style. He buries his head on the opponent’s shoulder to smother incoming blows and also to get a better look at what’s heading his way. He slips punches; he turns Griffith in the corner so that the offensive fighter is on the defensive. He throws out a right hand as a distraction then pumps a hard left jab. He curls his back and covers up his body crosswise, utilizing the famous “Philly Shell” for defense.
No, the razzle-dazzle isn’t there. But the blind man’s polish in executing these more conventionally stylish moves makes the legend of the wilder ones he was known to favor in his prime all the more believable.
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The best article to date about Emanuel Augustus was written in 2015 by Michael Dolan for Athletes Quarterly, the magazine he edits. Dolan had traveled from New York to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to look into Augustus’s condition; the previous fall, Augustus had been hit in the back of the head by an errant bullet fired by a stranger. The stray bullet fractured a vertebra, cut an artery, and left the boxer in a coma. Augustus already had fight-induced vision loss and memory problems.
But Augustus came out of the coma and underwent physical therapy—to regain the ability to feed himself, among other capacities. Dolan found Augustus living in a shabby home just feet from the Mississippi River, debilitated but not completely diminished. Surrounded by loved ones, Augustus could still recall fights of yore and the video game he tried to mimic in the ring, but he needed prompting. He was emotionally labile. The shadowy black-and-white shots taken by Dolan’s photographer, Mark Peterson, revealed the permanent disfiguration of Augustus’s face. It was pulled back to one side, as though he had suffered a stroke.
Here’s how Dolan described Augustus’s Drunken Master style: “It was so unorthodox and unique, it paralyzed fighters, hypnotized by its bizarre sequence.” Augustus’s longtime friend L. J. Morvant said, “You couldn’t ask Ali to fight like Tyson or Tyson to fight like Ali. Emanuel had to be himself in the ring. The showboating—that’s who he was!”
Only a small bit of that performance art was on display on January 11, 2007, in South Philly, when I saw him fight in person. Augustus had 532 rounds to his name when he entered the ring against the favored contender, “Kid Diamond.” I kept waiting for Augustus to break out of a conventional stance and tap his inner syncopated beat. There were small moments, sure. In the first, he slipped and ducked punches without even seeing them, as if by instinct alone. He threw old-school jabs to the body (a larger and more stationary target than the head, as well-trained fighters know) and parried punches with his right glove before countering—the ol’ catch and counter. None of these tricks was especially spectacular—but they were crafty enough to indicate the man could do far more were he so inclined. It was scheduled for only ten rounds, but if that was Augustus’s first, one could easily picture him dancing around Kid Diamond by the fifth.
The second-round bell only reinforced the notion, as Augustus came out slightly more offensive minded. Kid Diamond jabbed, and Augustus threw a counter right over the receding jab. It wasn’t a hard shot, but it wasn’t supposed to be—it was the rare counter meant to set up a secondary counter. As Kid Diamond avoided Augustus’s right hand, he bent his upper body straight into the path of an Augustus left hook. That was the thumper. When the round ended and Augustus returned to his corner, he declined to sit on the stool.
You know the old film trick—executed famously well in Citizen Kane—in which we see a character age greatly in just a few shots, underscoring how fast it all goes by? That’s what the following rounds resembled. Already in the second, Augustus’s defensive head movement began to slow. Kid Diamond popped him to the head a few times—just to see whether Augustus was laying a trap. But as the punches kept landing, Diamond grew more confident that there was no trap. In the third, Kid Diamond pounded the body until Augustus slumped, and then Diamond launched uppercuts. You could see Augustus trying to mount an ordinary combatant’s defense—hands held high, chin tucked—but he did it without strength or conviction. Ordinariness, not his strong suit, wouldn’t help him now. After the fifth round, Augustus sat on his stool for the first time all night.
As sad a sight as it was, it gave the man some pep. Ever so slightly renewed, Augustus opened the sixth round throwing Joe Frazier–style left hooks, only his body didn’t fall forward but pirouetted in place. Those were some balletic shots, and they scored. He landed a few rights next. Now, he started to dance to avoid punches, sliding under each one before popping back up and grinning—at Kid Diamond, the crowd, the cameras. “He’s gotta get back to being who he is,” said Bob Papa, the TV announcer, as though Augustus could turn on this charming litheness at will. If only. A minute later, the sixth round still very much under way, with about half the fight to go, Augustus looked depleted. In the seventh, when the referee tried to break up a clinch, Augustus shimmied out of it himself. Cute, but he immediately ate three hard shots to the face.
In the ninth, Augustus came out slugging, landing rights and lefts. Seconds later, he was sapped. Kid Diamond doubled up the left hook—banging Augustus to the body and the head in one smooth sequence—and shot a clean straight right that knocked Augustus to one knee. Augustus wasn’t dazed—his backside never even touched the canvas. He didn’t look disheartened, just spent. He took a deep breath—you could see his cheeks expand—and shook his head, then stood up at the count of eight. That combo that floored him had been his kind of combo, one that in his earlier days he could have deconstructed and rebuilt better and more cleverly. Now, though, he was powerless to defend against it.
Before the round, Augustus had told his trainer, “I don’t feel so hot.”
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Maybe “sad” isn’t the right word, but it’s at the very least dispiriting, maybe even disturbing, to see a man of nearly unimaginable talent diminished. Think of Roy Jones, his left held low as usual, finally being caught by a killer left and then a right after fifteen years as a pro, when Antonio Tarver and then Glen Johnson knocked him out and permanently vaporized his aura of stylish invincibility.
All fighters eventually lose (yes, Rocky Marciano retired undefeated and early, but that’s exactly the choice still held against him by his detractors), but some losses are harder to take than others. At a proper bullfight, the crowd wants the clever bull, the one who has conned the matador into missing him brilliantly, to be pardoned. So, too, men of mercury should never be reduced to molasses.
I didn’t see the best Emanuel Augustus that night, nor did the friend I persuaded to join me by talking up Augustus’s past exploits. Even as I hyped the event, I knew I was perverting the game. It was precisely because of those 532 rounds already logged that Augustus couldn’t be the fighter he once had been. A very capable veteran, sure, but not the stylist par excellence.
That may be the ultimate sign of stylishness: the unyielding faith of those who have beheld it. Hell, if someone gave me tickets to see Augustus right now—the disfigured, wounded Augustus—despite every rational qualm I’d have, a small voice inside me would nevertheless wonder whether he still might have it. One more fight, or one more round, or even just a minute, a single exchange more. My curiosity hasn’t dissipated at all.
“Do you know how much boxing fans loved watching you fight?” Michael Dolan asked the broken-down Augustus last year. “For real?” Augustus said. “You’re bullshitting me.” No one has managed to impart to Augustus what he meant to us. Very likely no one ever will. But even if we could, what would we say beyond that his exploits were pleasurable to the eye, that his movements were at times breathtaking, that if we could fight a lick, we’d love to do it the way only he could?
Not that those aren’t very fine compliments—and true. But they wouldn’t do justice to the element of stylishness. We can’t aspire exactly to emulate those who live in extremis, acting at the periphery of society and the possible, attempting the ordinary in spectacular fashion. We know we don’t have the innate talent to match them, or perhaps even the inclination. But the stylists reveal such goals as attainable—if not by all of us, then by our very best; if not for a full career, then for a brief moment. And those who enact impossible-seeming moves with their bodies teach all of us a new understanding of the boundaries of our world, because we’re all stuck in the same basic situation, all subject to corporeal bounds. The stylists sketch in neon just how expansive those boundaries can be.
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After Augustus climbed back up from the canvas that night in Philly, exactly two minutes remained in the ninth. Augustus would never have quit, but at the very least, with so much time left on the clock, he could’ve held on to Kid Diamond, grappled with him if need be, in order to last the round. It’s what I expected, what everyone in the arena likely did. So, of course, the master of style did essentially the opposite. He wrapped himself up, crossing his arms in front of his body in the “Philly Shell” defense Archie Moore had used fifty years earlier and George Foreman had adopted thirty years after that, a defense that relies upon technique, as opposed to brute clinching. Augustus was a stylist to the end, even when it was far too late for him to do anything but go the distance.